The Point of No Return
by Farla
Summary: A man goes into a forest. Remember, it's never just one mistake.
1. Now you know the whole story

Now you know the whole story.

Here are two facts for you:

1\. It's never just one mistake. It's not like you mess up once and it's all over, it's not like there's any one screwup that can't be fixed, it's not like something broken can't be repaired.

2\. It's never just one mistake.

When does this one start?

In March, a man goes into a forest.

A year back, someone else releases a pokemon.

Twelve years ago, his fletchinder is the only pokemon he keeps.

Thirteen years ago, he trades one pokemon for another.

Thirteen and a half, he catches his third pokemon.

One hundred and eight years ago, in March, a girl goes into a forest.

* * *

_Updating daily for the week._


	2. In March

_In March, a man goes into a forest._

Anderson absolutely loves his job.

Is logging hard? Yeah. Is it dangerous? Oh, yeah. But last week at the bar his wife's office worker of a brother was sobbing into his beer because the best days of his life had been getting third in the championship tournament when he was seventeen. Anderson can't relate. It'd been fun enough to get out of school and run around challenging other kids, and sure it's important to see the world and all that, but he'd never thought that was all there was to life and frankly, even pokemon battles get boring when you're doing them all day every day. He had always wanted to be a lumberjack, carry on the family tradition. Being outdoors, up and down trees and then downing them yourself, actually accomplishing something instead of just another cog in the mass of kids shoving to try to be king of the hill.

And, he thinks, as he breathes in deeply, the crisp, fresh mountain air flooding his lungs, there's more than one kind of outdoors. Kids on their pokemon journeys move about on the established roads between towns and cities, made safe by the weight of travelers and with the ground hard-packed by so many feet. It's easy going. It's boring going.

Even the ground out here is challengingly heterogeneous, pillow-soft and leafy soil shot through with an unyielding tangle of almost rock-hard roots, the sort of thing that can snap an ankle if you're not used to it. It smells clean and alive. His wife says the smell of it is that of decay, the gentle tugging apart by fungus, but his wife also says that after all, isn't the fungus just as alive as they are, shouldn't the fungus' supper be as celebrated as our own? Hamburgers on the grill are dead meat ground to paste by machines being seared by fire and coated in smoke and ash, and no one badgers people about how, actually, liking that smell is a trick of the brain, did you know that really...

(His wife keeps a parasect, though it's hard to say what came first, her defensive love of fungus or strangers who wouldn't stop making comments about how sad it was the paras evolved. All the cognition occurs within the mushrooms, she snapped at a party last month.)

It's a bit early to be out, March, but the thaw was early this year too. There's not even a crust of ice left under the leaves by now. It's been early more often than not these last years, though Anderson doesn't care much about the politics people insist on bringing into things like that. A little early, a little late, it's not a big deal in the scheme of things. The forest's still here, still the same as always. In some ways, he thinks he prefers it this way, how you have to pay attention to all the little cues, the crisp tang of the air and the wetness underfoot, and decide for yourself the best time to start on the trees again instead of just doing things the same time every year.

It's also good to be on the lookout for anyone a little too into politics, the sort who think spiking a tree and wrecking someone's livelihood makes for a fun day trip, the sort who might believe that they should get in a bit of sabotage before logging starts up again in spring. You wouldn't think tree-huggers would be so gung-ho about stabbing trees with metal, especially with all the complaints when he does that, but then, pretty much everything he hears from them seems to be a mess of contradictions. Now people are complaining about all the fletchling in the forest, saying there's too many of them and they're not 'native' species like that should matter and somehow that's all bad for biodiversity. Isn't it good so many pokemon can make a home here? How can anyone have anything against fletchling? They're great! Way less trouble than a lot of other pokemon.

He doesn't expect any of those sort to actually be dangerous or even particularly difficult, confronted alone out here. The dangers of the forest are the forest itself, of big trees and how high it is climbing up them and how hard and suddenly their branches can fall and the sharp things it takes to bring them down and all the ways all of that can go wrong.

And right now, he's also not too worried about risks of his job either because he's not here to fell trees just yet but just to get the lay of the land again. True, the leaves underfoot are more slippery than usual, not just from the dew between their layers but the slick mud underneath them. There's talk about mudslides, and yes, this is the sort of soil for that. But there won't be any.

If you listen to some tree-huggers talk about his job, you'd think it was about destroying the forest and leaving nothing but a barren wasteland behind. He's had people say to his face they can't believe someone like him can claim to love nature when he spends his life wrecking it. But there is not, in actual fact, any need to cut down every last tree before you move on to the next area. You don't look at a farm and accuse the farmer of destroying the land he harvests on. Or, well, maybe you do, that sounds about dumb enough for them. At any rate, he's not some clear-cutting incompetent. Take out the mature trees, leave others to hold onto the land while they grow. By the time they've taken advantage of that extra light (you're welcome) and moved from gangly adolescents to thick, hearty, harvestable adults far faster than they ever could in nature, they've also seeded the ground around them with the next generation of saplings.

Everyone wins. That's the thing some people just won't get, that you can have something that's best for everyone. The pokemon keep their forest home because there's still plenty of trees and the land can be harvested steadily because there's always new trees maturing.

And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding - or the river, to be specific. If he wasn't taking proper care of the land, if the mud was loose, the river would clog up the very next rain. The tree roots here hold fast to the dirt of the mountain and you can see that from the crystal clarity of the river flowing through. The water's clean enough to drink from, something he plans to do once he gets over the next ridge.

When he sees it by the water line, he's just confused. It looks like a a broken-down snag somehow still managing to leaf out in places, but this is a well-managed forest. Trees aren't just left to die around here, and even if he did miss signs of one ailing, it would never be allowed to get this far. It takes decades for a tree to fall apart like this one, maybe longer given that looks to be hardwood. That he can't quite identify what the tree is makes him still more confused, especially how he thinks he's seen that leaf shape before but for the life of him can't match it to a species or even an impression of the tree's shape.

Bidoof scatter into the water and onto the other bank at his approach and he scowls. He's going to have to clear this new nest out before they start wrecking things, chewing up his trees and clogging his river. See, this is exactly what he means, bidoof were never around when he was a kid and without his and the others' hard work caring for their forest, all sorts of things that shouldn't be here would just move right in.

And then the snag itself moves and he realizes his mistake. It's not a dying tree, it's a trevenant, ugh. He pulls the pokeball from the cord around his neck and pops it open, releasing his pokemon. "Fletchinder, burn it," he starts, and a dopey-eyed bibarel pops out of the trevenant's hollow trunk. It drenches his pokemon, and thanks to the splash, him, with a blast of icy water.

Anderson just feels irritation. It's just a stupid bibarel, after all, it's not much of an addition to the battle. "Acrobatics, Fletchinder," he orders. "Let's get this done fast."

Fast is what he expects but it's not what he gets. His fletchinder beats her wings like she's in water rather than air. For a moment he's concerned she's disoriented - that'd been water pulse just now, hadn't it - but then he realizes her chest is fluttering up and down in gulps of air the way she usually does before a fire attack. She launches herself at the bibarel, still far too slowly, and the trevenant's left branch, or limb, brutally smacks her to the ground before she can reach either of the pokemon, scattering half the feathers on one wing.

That hurt, but it's not enough to win the fight. "Flamethrower!" he cries. He's realized what's wrong. Soaked and chilled, the internal flame of his fletchinder, the fire she stokes to give herself her marvelous speed, is far too low. And the bibarel isn't the real concern here, it's the trevenant. They're vicious. The bibarel will turn tail when it sees the battle going against them, but once a trevenant goes after you, it doesn't stop.

Fletchinder puffs like a bellows and finally manages a white-hot jet of flame only for the attack to splatter outward around their opponents, dissipating harmlessly. One of them must know protect. The trevenant, evidently, because the moment Fletchinder's attack sputters out, the bibarel blasts her with more water.

He feels the first bit of real concern, not fear but the awareness this could go badly, that he needs to pay attention and be careful about this. Even if he had the choice, he'd have kept hammering away a while longer, would only have actually tried to run when his fletchinder went down. So, the fact it's now rather than any later that the roots twist under his feet, that he's tangled ankle-deep...the timing of that, at least, is not particularly important.

Anderson does not know what happens to his fletchinder. She is still alive when last he sees her, and it is entirely possible she turns tail and runs.


	3. A year back

_A year back, someone else releases a pokemon._

It's the sort of thing generally described as unspoken but Tammy's discovering that if you wait long enough without taking the hint, unspoken things become spoken ones, and she doesn't think she wants to see how long it takes them to rise from whispers to shouts.

It's totally fine for girls to be trainers. Really it is.

"Really it is."

It's fine for them to be gym leaders too, and some places (not here) even have women running half the gyms.

But she's not a gym leader, so, isn't it time...?

"You're not a little kid anymore, after all. You need to be thinking about the future."

And it's all well and good to visit, to study in Erika's gym, it's perfectly respectable.

"I'd never say a word against Erika."

But at a certain point, people start to wonder. You know.

You know.

And her trevenant...certainly the flowers are rather unique, no one's seen ones quite like that elsewhere, but even if the pokemon flowered more than once in a blue moon, those long long tufts of tiny plain white flowers are at once rather overpowering in flower arrangements and rather underwhelming in appearance. Too much and too little. It really isn't any good for anything but battles, you know?

"Not like your sweet little whimsicott."

Too little and too much, not good for anything but battles and too good by half at them.

Tammy doesn't actually like battling too much, to be honest. It's more of a hobby, she doesn't live and breathe it, it isn't the entirety of her life. She wants other things too, a house and kids, money to live comfortably.

And pokemon are a lot of work and they deserve better than someone distracted by other things. Hadn't that been why she'd passed off the exeggutor to an Alolan friend before she'd gone back home, because the climate wasn't right for him here?

It's a very straightforward process. She deposits her trevenant and then clicks through the options on the computer terminal. Release. Are you sure? Yes. And then it's done. It'll be fine. Her trevenant is quite tough.

She's never thought much about where pokemon get released to. Do they send them back to where they were found? Is that how it is for the trevenant, a long journey, seeing so many new things and having so many new experiences, and finally ending up right where you'd first left.

She hopes her trevenant had fun.

She says, "Oh, it was just too much trouble keeping such a big pokemon, and anyway, it was really only any good for battling," because it isn't like anyone made her, and if anyone had made her, well, then it'd have hardly mattered she'd gotten rid of the trevenant.

(She ends up marrying a gym leader, in the end, one who specializes in poison and got two region's worth of badges. She shows him the two cases she has of the same and never mentions the other three, and the bracelet with all its crystals stays buried in a box. Everyone's impressed by a girl with battling talent, but fewer want to keep one around. She's really lucky. It's a good fit for them both. It's hard work being a gym leader, and you really need someone else helping out to stay afloat. They end up splitting duties quite equitably - she trains them, he battles with them, he goes to conferences, she raises them while he's gone.)


	4. Twelve years ago

_Twelve years ago, his fletchinder is the only pokemon he keeps._

Pokemon are a lot of work and they deserve better than someone distracted by other things, Anderson knows, and, frankly? He's kind of tired of all the work maintaining them all is. And, "You've gotta have a fire type if you do any work in the forests, everyone knows that."

"What a practical boy you grew into," his mom says, and he beams.

"Been listening to your old man, huh?" his dad says, and he beams harder.

This is the part where in the stories he's grown up seeing on TV there's a nostalgic swell of music, he thinks back to all the good times he's had with them, and it's this huge deal, it's A Boy Becoming A Man And Putting Away Childish Things. They hug it out one last time, he gets just the hint of tears in his eyes but doesn't cry because he's too grown up for it now and this is the final proof of that, a badge even more important than any of the literal badges he got along the way.

But really, pokemon are just so much work. The teddiursa still gets into trouble if you take your eyes off him, if anything he gets into so much more trouble now that they're not battling all the time. He climbs on furniture and cabinets, even broke through the screen of one window. And even his well-behaved leafeon, the one who was so good from the very moment he got him, who he'd never expected difficulty from, is all antsy and alert these days. The leafeon's always jumping up and throwing himself into absolutely anything that looks like a task with entirely too much energy, to the point it's getting exhausting just thinking up stuff for the pokemon to exhaust himself on. He only got them and kept them because it's what you do, because he needed to prove he could handle himself in a fight and as a trainer.

And it wasn't awful, doing that, he's not saying he hated it or anything, just like it wasn't awful taking tests and doing homework to graduate from elementary school and move on to being a pokemon trainer. And just like that, he's still glad to be done with it all and able to move on to the next part of his life.

"I figured Flechinder's the best one I could have," he tells his parents. "Because it's part flying too. So it's not just good for dealing with a dangerous pokemon but if anything else goes wrong, or if I find somebody else in trouble, I'll be able to get help."

He loves the deep forest but he knows it can be dangerous. Indeed, that's part of what he loves so much about it, the challenge, the fact not everyone can handle it. You have to respect the forest. Other people, especially those who didn't grow up here, they could end up in real trouble because they don't know that.


	5. Thirteen years ago

_Thirteen years ago, he trades one pokemon for another._

"Three on three," the two trainers agree.

Anderson pats the phantump on his shoulder, tries to get it to pay attention. It obeys him okay but he's been having a bit of trouble getting it to understand battles, so he figures letting it watch other people's might make up for that.

The boy says, "Mareep, I choose you!"

"Go, Cottonee!" shouts the girl, the lilt of a foreign accent to her voice as she hurls the black and gold luxury ball out. It seems a little incongruous put next to her clothing: worn jeans fraying at the bottom, well broken-in sneakers, and a pink top that's stamped all over with flowers and glitter. It seems a little incongruous put next to her hair, straight and shoulder-length and ragged edged black, with a blue headband decorated with more flowers holding the bangs out of her face. It seems a little incongruous put next to her skin, no necklace around her neck, no earrings in her ears, no nail polish on any of her fingernails.

Anderson doesn't notice much about the boy besides the fact that he was on the other side of the battle, unremarkable and not worth even a full glance. The unremarkable boy says, "Start off with confuse ray, Mareep!" and the mareep bleats, the round ball on the tip of its tail starting to glow.

"Cottonee, use cotton spore!"

The cottonee puffs itself up and... Ah-hah! Closes its eyes as it shakes itself violently, knocking white fluff loose to drift in the air. Had she thought of that, or did she just get lucky?

"Uh," says the boy. His pokemon paws the ground with a foot, the pulsing glow remaining in its tail as it watches the cottonee.

"Now razor leaf!"

Her cottonee has to open its eyes for that, and the mareep lets out the blinding strobe-flash from its tail as soon as that happens, but there's no sign it hit its target's eyes. There's an awful lot of fluff between the two of them now. Then the cottonee blasts a gale of leaves toward the mareep, blowing the downy balls along with them, and the mareep is sliced and entangled at once. "Maaaa..." it complains, staggering a bit as it tries to loosen its legs. "Eeeeeeep."

"And stun spore!" she shouts.

"Thunderwave!" the boy retorts. "Two can play at this game!"

The cottonee puffs up suddenly, sending out a cloud of yellow dust. The mareep shouts, "Reep!" as electricity dances all over its puffy white wool and then jumps forward, arcing through the air into the cottonee's body. The cottonee squeaks and spasms. Meanwhile, the yellow dust drifts slowly, avoidably, toward the mareep, who begins to struggle against the fluff entangling it. For a moment it looks like the mareep might get clear, and then it overreaches and falls sideways, thick fur cushioning the blow but its little blue legs now waving helplessly in the air as the spores roll over it. It trembles and shakes.

So now they're both half paralyzed. Well, that was kind of a wash, wasn't it?

The girl's grinning, though, as if this is still going great for her. Does she know something he doesn't, or is she just really confident? Or, maybe she's just one of those people who likes battles whether they're winning or losing. "Leech seed," orders the girl.

The boy groans theatrically as the seeds hit and sprout. "Alright, Mareep, return. Go, Swinub!" The pokemon materializes and lets out a high-pitched grunt. "Ice shard!"

"In!" the swinub squeaks, and spits a sharp projectile that smacks point-first into the drifting cottonee, sending it flying with a squeal of pain.

"Sunny day, Cottonee!"

"Coooooneee!" The cottonee...ah, it's hard to describe, like he can almost see what's happening but there's a slight of hand, a discontinuity. The air or the light above the pokemon shifts, and the only thing he can think of is like watching broken glass played backward, like an infinity of crystal bits snapping into place into perfect and seamless clarity. The sunlight just rushes down, nothing getting in the way of it, and there's a blast of light and heat he has to squint against. The sun's no bigger in the sky but it's so much brighter.

The swinub squeaks again, sounding more distressed, and without an order begins to spit ice shard after ice shard. The cottonee yips and grunts, looking like it's attempting to get clear of the attacks but when it moves too sharply it ends up twitching and spasming in place, then pelted by chunks of ice one after another.

"Return, Cottonee. Exeggutor, go!" the girl shouts, and he has never seen an exeggutor like that, with the neck going up and up and up and up.

The swinub crams its face into the ground and digs, sending up a shower of dirt that hides it from view even before it actually manages to bury itself.

"What? No!" the boy cries. "Swinub! Get back up here, we need to use ice moves! Icy wind, use icy wind on it!"

"Power whip as soon as it pops up, Exeggutor!" The exeggutor lets out a bugling cry, so much richer than he expects, and when the swinub tries to obey its trainer's order, the poor thing's head is barely visible before the exeggutor's head crashes into the hole with all the force of a toppling tree.

The attack probably didn't connect, because when its head raises again with the creak of a bending bough, there's no sign of the swinub in the crater of dirt left behind. After a moment, the swinub pops up from a new hole nearby and the exeggutor's head topples again.

"Tor!" it cries when it unbends, and he watches it hop back and forth on stubby legs, watches the strange tail this one has wag rapidly.

"Behind you!" the girl warns, having noticed some sign in the ground he missed just before the swinub quite pops out, but it's probably not needed because the exeggutor is already bending backward with as much ease and speed as the times before.

By all appearances, the swinub wasn't expecting to be noticed half so quickly. It's just puffing up to try to blow an icy wind and the tiny delay of that means this time, the blow lands. The back of the exeggutor's head is frosted when it comes back up but the sun is still blazing above and it only shakes itself once before the thin crust melts back into water. Meanwhile, the swinub remains stunned and barely twitching in the dirt.

"Ugh, Swinub," the boy whines. He sighs and recalls his pokemon, then throws out the last one. The pokeball spins through the air and splits apart to release a puddle of lava. "Alright, it's all on you, Slugma! Start off with flame burst!"

The slugma gamely spits a burst of flame into the exeggutor's thicker lower body. It rolls over the smooth sides, leaving behind a smokey mark but not much sign it actually harmed the slugma's opponent.

"Ha!" shouts the girl. "Exeggutor, they think you can't handle a little heat! Show them how outraged that makes you!"

"Ex egg gu tor!" the exeggutor bellows, stomping its feet.

"Rapidfire ember!" The boy sounds frantic.

The slugma shoots balls of fire at the charging pokemon, all of them bouncing off the exeggutor with little effect. He's confused for a moment, expecting it to slam its head down again, by how the exeggutor keeps getting closer and closer, and then it actually jumps and stomps down on top of the slugma, squishing it almost flat.

"Show them we mean business! Use overheat, Slugma, burn it up!"

The slugma under the exeggutor's feet turns from orange to a blue-white that leaves an afterimage on his eyes, and the entire area goes up in flame. The exeggutor cries out, through it sounds at least as much in surprise as in pain, and totters backward. As the flames fade he can see its legs are blackened and still smoking, with a line of embers glowing faintly along the side of one foot.

The slugma doesn't look that great either. It pulls itself together a bit, raising a goopy head, though the rest of its body remains puddled on the burnt and blackened ground.

He thinks it seems hard to say how the battle will go, but the girl grins as wide and predatory as a sharpedo. "Great job, Exeggutor!" she cheers. "You've got this! Now, use facade!"

She checks her pokemon over after the battle, then recalls it and looks around as if she's only just registered their audience. Her eyes catch on him.

"Oh. My. God!" shouts the girl, rushing over. "A phantump!"

To be honest? It's because he thinks she's cute and because he's a little in awe of her after seeing her battle. It isn't a coherent thought, there's no particular benefit for him to giving her the pokemon. He's too inexperienced to try to transition into asking her to hang out afterward and he's far too inexperienced to even want to use it as a bargaining chip, let alone try to. But he's not particularly attached to the phantump and anyway, she actually offers quite a good trade for it, a sweet leafeon that's stronger than the phantump or any of his other pokemon, who ends up carrying him through to his fifth badge.

"It won't, uh, sorry to say but it won't stay a cute phantump if it's traded," he warns her, and gets a roll of her eyes in return.

"I know," she tells him, and then in an excited burst, "A trevenant is possibly the only thing better than a phantump. Who wouldn't want a trevenant?" She gets a little starry-eyed and continues, "They're the coolest of all the grass types!" with the obvious rider that grass types are, in her unhumble opinion, already the very best kind of pokemon you can possibly get. "You know, the tree the spirit's attached to doesn't just look green, it's actually living and growing, able to keep going just fine even though it's all in pieces. They say a trevenant isn't the ghost of a dead tree, it's the reincarnation of one."

He does not actually know that, and he says, "It's funny you'd say that. I caught this near where I live, but the leaves don't look like any of the species of tree I've seen around there. And my dad's a lumberjack and he took me out logging a bunch of times already, so I know a lot about the trees that live around there. Maybe it's some ancient fossil."

"Maybe!" She peers at it. Her hand runs gently along the underside of its strange, many-toothed leaves, then across the craggy bark. "The leaves look like almost a chestnut, but those have smooth bark. Who's a little itsy-bitsy mystery?" she coos, twirling a finger along one stubby limb. "Who is? It's you!" And she laughs and says, "Can you imagine, this actually being some prehistoric tree from long before the dawn of man, brought back to life by the power of this teeny little thing for us to see for the first time?"

"Yeah," he says, but he's not, really, doesn't quite understand where her enthusiasm comes from. She's got eyes for his pokemon in a way he's never felt about any of them, while he's got eyes for her.


	6. Thirteen and a half

_Thirteen and a half, he catches his third pokemon._

He is visiting home, not staying. He wants the distinction clear because, while he's already finding this whole trainer business a bit tedious and a lot less exciting than people claimed it would be, everyone knows only absolute losers drop out with just a single badge and Anderson is not anyone like that. You've got to prove you have what it takes to get at least a couple badges if you want people to take you seriously as an adult.

He wants that so much and so much more now, other kids sneering at his slow hick drawl, how he comes from the ass end of nowhere, and he refuses to agree with them, does not see anything worth running away to in the big cities they're so proud of being from, he loves his family and his town and his endless and eternal forest, he wants there to be no confusion that he chose this no belief that he's settling no question that he didn't choose this wholeheartedly. He doesn't care what anyone else thinks. It's his home, not theirs, and nothing about it needs to change. They're the ones who should change.

He'll need to raise more pokemon, though. He's got a teddiursa and a fletchling at the moment and two pokemon is just not enough, even if they're already a handful to deal with, he'll need to get a third pokemon. And what better place to pick up another one than around where he grew up and where he'll come back home to someday?

He's barely walked out of his house before he sees a weave of zigzagoon, no doubt sniffing around looking for trash to make a mess of. Garbage eating garbage pokemon. "Go, Fletchling! Tackle them!"

"Et!" his fletchling chirps, fluttering at them. They scatter every which way, all of them zigzagging dizzily to make it hard for his pokemon to target any one in particular. She ends up tackling the rearmost one. It rolls up in a ball, squeaking loudly, and another one twists backward and headbutts his fletchling off it. The ball unrolls and the two of them vanish through a hole in a neighbor's fence. Well, that's Mr. Greenfield's problem now.

He continues through town, toward the outskirts where cooler pokemon might be found. Still far from there, he hears something rustling in a bush and gets excited by the possibility it could be something rare but all he finds is a minun near the bottom. Bleck. "Teddiursa, attack! Use fury swipes!" Having a teddiursa for a starting pokemon is bad enough, especially with the lazy thing taking his sweet time evolving into a properly impressive ursaring. He doesn't need some stupid cute minun on his team as well, like some sort of girl.

"Nun!" squeaks the minun as his teddiursa claws at it. Despite his order, the move's basically scratch still, none of the rapid speed he's seen from experienced trainers' pokemon using the move. "Nun!" Electricity sparks on its cheeks and it smushes its face against his teddiursa, who lets out a cry and jerks backward, away from the high-voltage nuzzle. Released, the minun speeds clear in what looks an awful lot like quick attack, but without the whole attacking part. "Mi!" More electricity is sparking on its cheeks.

"Hey, don't just let it go," he complains. "Come on, keep swiping, take it out already."

"Ted!" His teddiursa gamely jumps into the bush to where the minun's retreated and claws at its side again. A spark of electricity jumps across and the teddiursa flinches back, then growls and leans forward to swipe at it again, scoring deep red lines down the minun's side and sending the pokemon tumbling off the branch and down into the dirt, where it curls up, quivering.

"Good job, Teddiursa," he says, even if it wasn't really all that great, and returns his pokemon to the pokeball.

He finds a weedle on the underside of the branch of an ornamental cherry tree planted at the side of the road. Bug pokemon like weedle are for weirdos and kids whose parents wouldn't, or couldn't afford to, get a starter pokemon, but removing bugs from people's trees before they chew them all up is an important job for pokemon trainers.

"Fletchling! Peck!" His pokemon gamely flings herself toward the weedle, who spits out a web of string that she struggles under a moment, then breaks off. She's not much better with peck than his teddiursa is with fury swipes and her attack's ultimately more like tackling the weedle beak-first, but it's enough to knock the bug to the ground. She follows it down and, ew. "Don't eat that," he criticizes, about to recall her. Looks like the weedle was even weaker than he thought.

"Drill!" shrieks a beedrill above, and she barely gets out of the way. She does, though, and the beedrill's left stinger-arm is jammed into the sod for a moment. A serious fight!

"Use agility," he tells her. It's the most complex move she knows. He watches her seem to hyperventilate, and he wonders, very briefly and with little true interest, if the fire that'll burn in her when she evolves has already kindled somewhere in her center. "And quick attack," he continues. "Don't get hit, if you get poisoned I have to go all the way back to the pokecenter."

Even beedrill are kind of… it'd be sort of a useful pokemon to have, considering he's only got two at the moment and they still need a lot of training, but only sort of. Kids who are struggling might be desperate enough to catch one just because it's evolved and big-looking, even though it's never going to be all that good. Getting it would be like saying he'll never raise a real pokemon properly and just gave up.

He might've changed his mind if it beat his pokemon, but that's not how this goes. It would have been different if he'd used the teddiursa, but his fletchling has the advantage and, despite being caught second, is already stronger and more experienced as well. She's the one he favors. She'll evolve into a fire type and everyone knows, Dad himself has said so many times, you've got to have a fire pokemon if you want to be a lumberjack when you grow up, it's not safe to go deep into the forest without one of them to help protect you, and only delusional tree-huggers think there's no need for solid protection in their forest. It's why his dad keeps a simisear.

How this goes is, his fletchling flies for it, claws out, and scores a hit across its face while it's still got itself hooked in the sod. Probably it's the root of that cherry tree that really holds it, the one whose leaves the weedle was unrepentantly chewing on as if the tree was a free lunch and didn't belong to anyone at all.

Messing up a beedrill's eye isn't as big a deal as it is for most other sorts of pokemon. He doesn't know the details, that it's a compound eye and the ones not torn out or crushed by his pokemon's talons remain functional or that the untouched eye on the other side of its face provides an almost hundred and eighty degree range of vision on its own, more than he manages with both eyes. He just knows beedrill can still cause a lot of trouble even when they look badly damaged, and so he says, "Don't let your guard down!" to his pokemon, and then, "Try pecking it!"

His fletchling flaps forward in another beak-first tackle, breaking a hole in the beedrill's exoskeleton, in the thicker lower body, then twisting to bring her talon's to bear again, hooking them into the opening and tearing out a large chunk of plate.

"Ew," he says again, with a lot more feeling.

The beedrill buzzes and its antenna convulses, which doesn't sound anything like he thinks a scream does. Its wings flail and it lifts into the sky, retreating.

"You won!" he tells his fletchling, and pets the fluffy red top of her head. She cheeps, rubbing against his hand. "Look at that dumb beedrill run away! That'll teach it to attack people out of the blue!"

And then he puts her back in her pokeball and keeps looking for his third pokemon.

He knows that beyond town that there's better pokemon. He was just hoping for a shorter walk if his pokemon got too beat up and he had to trek all the way back to the pokemon center to heal them and try again. Now that he's thoroughly established the pokemon around are as disappointing as he remembers them being, he heads toward the trees.

He sees a bunnelby by the road, in the tangle of patchy, too-tall grass and weeds, but its huge ears rotate toward the sound of his footsteps and then it darts to the left and vanishes out of sight into some burrow. He's got no water pokemon to flood it out and while he could tell his teddiursa to try digging too, he really doesn't think his pokemon can possibly dig up a burrow faster than a bunnelby could dig it deeper. Way too much work to battle a pokemon that he doesn't even want to catch.

A bunch of fletchling take flight from the bushes by the edge before he gets nearly close enough to set his own fletchling or teddiursa on them. Whatever, though, he doesn't want two of the same kind of pokemon.

Far from where he is, a tiding of ralts pause in digging tubers by the river. They perk up, raise their heads and turn them back and forth, feeling it out with their horns to confirm. Then without any word, they pick up the tubers they've unearthed and begin to drift in the opposite direction, unhurried.

There's patches of flowers growing in the half-sun, half-shade of the treeline, and on a large sunflower, grown from some seed that escaped from a nearby birdfeeder perhaps, a flabebe peers at him.

"Fletchling!" he cries once again, sending the little bird out. "Start off with a tackle!"

"La!" the even smaller flabebe squeaks, and a pair of vines lash out toward his fletchling. Dummy, like that's going to work. His pokemon hops into the air, her wings beating hard, and the vines don't even get close. She strikes the flabebe and the flower so hard it bends all the way to the ground.

"Aaaa!" A burst of pinkish wind shoots from the pokemon or the flower, sending his fletchling tumbling back.

"Don't let it push you around, Fletchling!" he orders. "Quick attack!"

"Tch!" Her claws catch on a patch of grass and she beats her wings to stabilize herself and correct the angle, then she launches again straight at the flabebe with shocking speed. The flabebe is knocked loose this time, along with a number of yellow petals. It tumbles through the smaller flowers, bounces into the lower broughs of a small pine and is rolled back toward them again, coming to a halt in a patch of buttercups, up against a odd tuft of broad leaves.

"Bebe!" the flabebe cries, and the leaves wiggle, then begin to rise up into the air. A deep blue oddish pops out of the soft ground and its beady little red eyes open to glower up at him. "Iiiiish," the new pokemon growls.

A bellsprout would be one thing, but even though oddish can evolve into two different things, both of those things are just more flowers and one even looks like it's a doll in a dress. Plus everyone knows they're used in making perfume.

As such he's just mad. "Cheaters," he accuses, because it is not at all fair of them to ambush him with another pokemon when he's already in the middle of a battle.

"La be la be la be la!" babbles the flabebe with a weird seriousness, floating above the oddish's leaves. "La be la be la be la!"

"Di!" the oddish cries, and then it spits a bunch of bubbly orange liquid, dousing his fletchling.

"Ing ing ing ing ing ing ing!" she shrieks, running around in circles flapping her wings and rolling around on the dirt.

"Use quick attack again!" he tells her, but she just keeps running around trying to shake the acid off. Not paying attention to where she's going, she gets close to the oddish, which hops forward a step and abruptly wraps the leaves on its head around his fletchling. She flails slightly, then goes limp as the oddish absorbs her energy.

"That doesn't even count," he says with a scowl, because it really doesn't. He didn't decide to use the fletchling to keep fighting against the oddish. He recalls his pokemon out from the tangle of leaves and sends out his teddiursa to replace her. "Fury swipes fury swipes!" he shouts. "Come on, do it fast."

His teddiursa scurries forward to reach the oddish and then rears back up onto two legs to try to follow his order, though as usual, it only gets in a single swipe and then the oddish spits another batch of corrosive acid right into his teddiursa's eyes. The teddiursa handles it better than the fletchling, or at least in a more useful way, giving a grunt and then smacking the oddish with a frustrated uppercut. The oddish is knocked into the still-floating flabebe, who yips and ends up banging into a tree stump. The oddish bounces back down, rolls to get its feet under it, and scurries away. The flabebe just falls and lies on the ground, apparently unconscious.

"Alright, Teddiursa!" he says.

Then a dark mist starts to balloon out of a hole in the top of the tree stump. It lifts upward, a bit like the oddish popping up from under the ground only the earth beneath is undisturbed. Instead, the same mist flows out from underneath, forming into a simple wisp body with two stubby arms. A pair of lights appear in the center and those red eyes fix on him.

"Cool," he says, and throws a pokeball into its face.

So you understand: there were so many other pokemon he could've caught.


	7. One hundred and eight years ago

_One hundred and eight years ago, in March, a girl goes into a forest._

Delores wanders through the trees with no idea where she's headed.

Do you think that's the end of it? That there's an answer now, a clear place to point to for what went wrong? A dumb kid makes a dumb choice, story over?

She goes into the forest for a reason.

Her father's dead and her mother's dead. Not at the same time, and maybe, sad as it is, it'd have been kinder for her to have lost them in one stroke. Instead it was first one and then the other, with a remarriage in between the two, and her stepmother's getting married again now.

She goes into the forest for a reason, and no one finds her for a reason. There's still snow on the ground.

Don't those reasons have reason too, though? How far back are you willing to go? If her father hadn't been so desperate to remarry, hadn't gotten a wife from so far off, he wouldn't have caught ill from her. If it'd been any midwife instead of the doctor there was, her mother wouldn't have died. Should we question why there's no midwife by this point or just accept the reason and look no further? Perhaps blame goes to the apprentice, who gave up the profession and trained no replacement, when she knew, she surely knew, there'd be precisely these sort of consequences? Or the last midwife, an old woman with a tongue sharp from arthritis and a cuddly purrloin and so, so many drying plants, perhaps that's where the blame lies, perhaps if she'd only done things a little differently or a little less, kept a little quieter, let them burn the purrloin... Perhaps not, though.

And it branches, doesn't it. There was a doctor, wasn't there, and why didn't he know what an old woman had, why wouldn't he even wash the rot of corpses from his hands? She'd have made it, Delores' mother, if the doctor only hadn't been there. If he hadn't reached in.

But there's too much at this point and perhaps it's only a distraction, all the branches and all the knots.

Perhaps there's too many pitfalls and patching up one would only change the reason and not the outcome. Perhaps she'd have gone into the forest even if things went a different way.

What is certain is Delores goes into the forest. She does not have any pokemon with her because Delores is five years old.

You know this doesn't end well, but let it be said, the forest is kind enough. She smiles at pokemon that in later years will be gone: a pikipek who merrily hammers a hole in a bug-infested dead oak, a mightyena and pups who sniff the air and regard her curiously before continuing on their way, a sluggish servine who wriggles away through the snow-buried leaf litter when her weight crunches apart a fallen branch nearby. There are songs sung above her that have been sung for ten thousand years. They will last until the first machine rumbles in to drown them out, and then they will depart for good.

She's early enough for them but too late for the huge trees, the ones that were once the most common species of the forest. They withered to fungal blight brought over from halfway around the world years and years before she was born, another string of events and decisions. But they don't die all at once, they insist on sprouting back up from their own roots, trying to fight their way out of the grave again only for their bark to split and the blight slide back in. After she stares enchanted at her favorite pokemon, bidoof, playing in the swollen nearly to a lake river, after she slips walking on the bibarel's dam -

(her stepmother had just got her those shoes, and she's not used to them)

\- and ends up soaked in icy meltwater from up the mountain, she finds the old hollow of one of those trees, stump shrouded in new shoots to block the wind almost completely. It's dry and not even dusty, the wood slower to rot than the other kinds of trees. And she curls up there because she is cold and tired, and she shivers, and she stops shivering. Her breathing slows as she falls asleep. And then that stops too.

One hundred and eight years ago, in March, a girl goes into a forest.

In April, what's left of a man's body washes out of the forest.

"It just goes to show, you can be the sort of person who does everything right, we all know he always did everything right, and yet," a grieving community will say, "this kind of thing can still happen."

"It just goes to show, just one mistake," a grieving community will say, "just one miscalculation, one bit of bad luck, and this can happen out of nowhere."


End file.
